Web Architecture, Management and Marketing

I’m new to Flex but still enjoyed the Mate framework presentation from Laura at asfusion.com.  I know that I need to think ahead of time how I’m going to organize all the events in my application.   This could simply be a design pattern.  The Mate framework has the idea of an Event Map to organize events in a central location.  Larger applications with multiple function sets can have multiple event maps.  I like how Mate and the Event Maps are organized.  I don’t feel like there would be much of an additional learning curve to start using Mate.  It looks pretty lightweight too.

If you’re looking into Flex, Mate is worth a look.  The site is well organized and has solid documentation so far.  This alpha version of Mate has well written, clear documentation and an api reference.  The documentation for users of many frameworks and apps is clearly an afterthought.  I really appreciate the Mate team spending time on their docs.  Additionally, I’ve enjoyed hacking up the FlickrBook example app to get a good idea for what’s going on with Mate.

cfvideo scenes

I think the idea of a cfvideo tag would be a solid feature for the future. In particular I’ve wanted to be able to pull off something with streaming video like is done on ted.com. The overlay at the bottom of each video that shows scene markings is very useful. It would be nice if as a developer or content producer if all I needed for navigation within a video were timecodes and optional chapter/scene titles.

cfvideo subtitles

I have a use right now for being able to programatically add subtitle overlays to video files. The anatomyofchristianity.org wordpress blog I developed has flash videos that I would like to integrate Bible references into at specific times. I already need to make a list of the timecodes and references. If I could just take that list and feed it into a script, that would save me tons of time of using Final Cut for busy work.

cfvideo tag for lazy amateur editors

Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, cameras are cheap. By the time CF9 is released, the cost of storage, bandwidth and cameras will open up working with video to a huge market. Video files will only get bigger and more irrelevant. Something like the iMovie 08 takes a step at making simple editing for lazy amateur editors but that’s still too much for some people. Being able to have a cfvideo tag that could make cuts, even if they were non destructive for performance enhancement could go a long way in making some cool webapps.

cfvideo transcoding with user specified tools

I don’t think adobe would be able to provide a solid transcoding product without getting into a nightmare of licensing issues. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to just specific some arguments and point cfvideo to ffmpeg for example.

Here’s some notes I took from the cfObjective community giving feature requests to the Adobe team for ColdFusion 9. This list is incomplete. Some requests were hard to catch and I came in a bit late. But here’s a bunch that were talked about. I’m bolding items I felt were particularly well received. Of course, this is totally subjective.

• parse action script 3 natively within coldfusion (compile it into java) … there was passionate discussion here, in my opinion though it seems very difficult and something that wouldn’t provide enough short term profit for the effort.  I could be missing the big picture though.
• ability to throw exceptions in cfscript
• cfscript should do all of the language construct
• ktml support for rich text editor … ktml sounds doubtful as this is a retired product
• ability to flatten pdf forms, so forms can be created, sent to customer and customers cannot edit.
• add <cffinally> tag as in try, catch, finally
• transaction managers for nested transactions
• a packaging system to easily distribute cf apps as single file, like java has jar files
• tags that generate html would have the capability to use html 4.01 strict not just xhtml
• compress javascript files
• cfhtmlfoot tag to write content immediately before closing html tag
• onrequstend that stops breaking cfcs … I may have misheard this one
• trusted cache and turn it on or off per application
• being able to cache parts of a page only
• ability to strip down whitespace so html is a single line, aggressive whitespace management
• name elements by attributes and be able to clear specific elements in cache
• be able to cache something until change
• better dealing with null values
• info in server monitor about unit tests of code to show code quality to management
• ability to script to photoshop, indesign
• hibernate, jpa, orm integration
• cfvideo tag like cfimage, ability to add chapters or cut longer video into clips

Do you need to create an ANSI or OSHA compliant sign for your business.? St. Claire Inc. has a tool for you to build your sign and generate a PDF. Here’s an important notice I have displayed in the lab.

The word wrap and selection wrap support in Eclipse leaves a bit to be desired. The biggest problem for me is that I can’t remember how to do even do it in a default install. I think there’s something in the editor config but it’s difficult to find and I always forget where it is.

I recently found this script for Wrapping Text using Eclipse Monkey. It’s some simple javascript that does hard wrapping around a certain number of characters per line. It pays attention to words and will insure that your lines never go beyond a particular column width.

This solution works for my particular needs of having to past in some content from Firefox into html files in Eclipse. Firefox doesn’t pay attention to the line brakes in the copying process so I end up getting some huge, ugly looking lines in Eclipse. For html output, the hard wrap of lines, with a return after each line is fine. If you’re using the CFEclipse plugin for Eclipse, there’s an icon in the tool bar that allows for soft wrapping of the text. This is really the best way to go for non-destructive wrapping. But that does assume you’re using CFEclipse and in that view. Outside of that, this script using the Eclipse Monkey plugin is a big help.

Eclipse Monkey, Project Dash is sweet. It basically allows you to build plugins into the Eclipse interface using javascript, offering clean menu integration and hotkey support right out of the box. I’ve spent all of 10 minutes thusfar with Eclipse Monkey, have installed this word wrap script and already have some other ideas of scripts I could pull off quickly.

In tuning a server I came across an interesting note in this MySQL Optimization presentation on the mysql site.

If you run the client and MySQL server on the same machine, use sockets instead of TCP/IP when connecting to MySQL (this can give you up to a 7.5 % improvement). You can do this by specifying no hostname or localhost when connecting to the MySQL server.

In setting up this server, I thought I had a good idea in setting all the hostnames in the data source connections to 127.0.0.1.  I assumed the server wouldn’t have to do the extra translation of a hostname to an ip address.  Sure enough it looks like this does more harm than good by forcing a tcp connection.

I’m at Flex Camp Chicago right now.  Bob Tierney from Adobe is giving a keynote, reviewing some internal proof of concept flex apps.  While Bob did not specifically mention this, he had an interesting New York Times article on his screen.  This article, Airlines Work on Systems to Reduce Delays has an image of an application from American Airlines that is clearly a Flex app.  That’s a pretty big name company using Flex, particularly for a publicly facing app.

Also this hasn’t been mentioned yet but I notice the Mate framework for Flex will be discussed at cfObjective this upcoming May by Laura Arguello.  I haven’t been able to get my hands on this yet but it sounds interesting.

MacHeist’s software bundle may or may not live up to all the hype it received over the past few months.  Either way, I do feel it’s a good deal on software.  Pixelmator is an incredibly cool photo editing application.  It’s hand down one of the most beautifully crafted software apps out there both in user interface and stability.  The fact that it uses your video card’s ram in order to work with images makes things so incredibly responsive.  That app in itself makes the bundle’s price of $49 worth it if you’re specific imagery needs are met by Pixelmator.   Unfortunately for some of the more mundane stuff I find myself needing to do with images like prepping for the web are a bit cumbersome in Pixelmator if not impossible in some instances, but as a secondary image app for creativity, it’s really cool.  I will also find myself using CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X for work.  I do already have Xyle Scope for css but CSEdit may work out a little better.  And I do not have an app like Snapz pro.  1Password has been interesting for password management and I may use that permanently for my personal passwords.  For work, we’ve been using the website http://www.passpack.com as a shared, web based password management system.  That’s really worked out well.  But I’ve been finding that for two different sets of passwords, it’s handy to have two totally separate systems.  As for the rest of the MacHeist apps, I think it’s mostly fluff but I’m sure there’s some useful stuff to be had.

As of the writing of this post, there’s 9 days left to get the bundle at $49.  If you check it out at this link, I’ll get some freebies too

Random post based on MacBreak ep. 70.

Thanks to Merlin Mann for the title, this should make it into his mannerisms (pdf). If you’re someone who would watch Darth Vader make hash browns, you’ll love the Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978. Holy smokes. This could very well be the most wonderfully horrible bit of video I’ve seen. Wow. Do a search for Star Wars Holiday Special on You Tube for clips. Or you can find the full special floating around usenet. Or if you’re campically challenged but still want to get in on the fun, check out this version from Rifftrax to have the humor explained for you.

Just ran across this list of OSX menu bar items. Great collection. The menu bar app, Caffeine was pointed out to me. This great little app allows you to disable and enable your energy saver settings with a single click. So basically you can be a good little monkey and use efficient energy saver settings most of the time but then if you need it, click the ZZZ in the menu bar to make sure your computer won’t go to sleep. If you give a presentation or watch a movie with your laptop unplugged, you know the annoyance of your screen shutting off or your screen saver coming on. I’ve enjoyed HimmelBar but don’t see a need for it in leopard with the stacks functionality. If you’re still using Tiger, check it out. iDiskMenu looks very cool as well as a menu app to mount and unmount webdav and ftp network shares. Unfortunately this doesn’t fire up in Leopard but it gets me wanting something to easily manage network shares. Also nfs support is a must for me. I’ll need to figure that out. Seems like a perfect job for the RixStep guys.

I’ve got CF8 running in single server mode on my MacBook. I also recently installed VMware Fusion for virtual machine support. Running virtual machines creates separate lan networks on your system which can raise some networking issues with things like vpn’s and servers you may run that broadcast to all available ip addresses. JRun for running ColdFusion turned out to be one such problem server.

By default JRun tries to broadcast itself to all available ip addresses. You can verify your setup by checking your jrun.xml file around line 385.

<attribute name="deactivated">false</attribute>
<attribute name="interface">*</attribute>
<attribute name="port">51800</attribute>

That star tells jrun to broadcast itself to all ip addresses hooked up on the machine. I’ve even seen it crash trying to broadcast to a fake ip assigned to the firewire port (think that one’s an Apple bug).

Anyway, there’s really no need for most of us to broadcast to anything but 127.0.0.1, your localhost. So change that star to 127.0.0.1 so that the complete line reads:

<attribute name="interface">127.0.0.1</attribute>

Hopefully this will save you a headache, if not now than in the future if you start adding networks to your machine.